Amos T. Akerman

Amos Tappan Akerman (23 February 1821-21 December 1880) was US Attorney General from 23 November 1870 to 13 December 1871, succeeding Ebenezer R. Hoar and preceding George Henry Williams.

Biography
Amos Tappan Akerman was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in 1821, and he graduated from Dartmouth College in 1842 and then moved to the American South. He became a school headmaster in North Carolina and a tutor and lawyer in Georgia, where he came to own a farm and 11 slaves. He became a colonel in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War, but, during Reconstruction, he became a Republican. He became an outspoken attorney advocate for freedmen's rights  in Georgia, and President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him to serve as Attorney General in 1870. He vigorously prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan in the South, and he also prosecuted important land grant cases concerning railroads in the expanding American West. Due to his integrity against railroad magnates, Grant was pressured by Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano to demand Akerman's resignation; he also did not want to appear to be a military dictator due to Akerman's grinding the South into submission. Akerman's resignation ended any chances that the Republican Party had to become a national party of true racial equality, and he died in Cartersville, Georgia in 1880.